Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Staunton, November 25 – The Circassians
and Crimean Tatars are linking up as part of a broader plan orchestrated by
Turkey and the West to undermine Russian influence in the Middle East and to
challenge Russian control of the North Caucasus and occupied Crimea, according
to Russian commentator Vladislav Gulyevich.

Activists in the
two movements are counting on support from what they say are the six to eight
million Circassians and four to six million Crimean Tatars living in Turkey and
elsewhere in the Middle East, Gulyevich says. And they can be counted on to “intensify
their anti-Russian propaganda” against not only governments there but in their
homelands.

Turkey and
behind it the West more generally is interested in supporting each of these
movements and in their unity as well because these backers believe that this
combination of Circassian and Crimean Tatar “nationalist discourse” can “undermine
the existing status quo” and promote “an anti-Russian vision of the future of
the Black Sea and Caspian region.”

The conflict in
Ukraine, like the conflicts in the North Caucasus, is going to last a long
time, and this project of the West is based on that assumption.Turkey and the West hope that in the future
what today appear to be only marginal movements will be the basis of
transforming the geopolitics of the region.

According to
Gulyevich, Russia should expect to see “the unification of the Crimean Tatar
and ‘Greater Circassian’ nationalists in the international arena,” with the two
groups “coordinating their efforts, seeking to attract attention, expanding
their activities in the information sphere, and reinforcing one another with
their ‘national-liberation’ theses.”

These two “projects,”
although they are typically viewed as completely separate, in fact represent
complementary actions on Russia’s flanks in the Black Sea and Caspian region.
Both are intended “not only to deprive Russia of a way out to the Caucasus
section of the Black Sea littoral but to undermine the stability of the southern
borders of the European part of Russia and weaken its position” there.

Gulyevich’s
language is both hyperbolic and infected by the conspiratorial visions which
inform so much of current Russian commentary, but he is correct that the
Circassians and the Crimean Tatars are finding common ground and that that mutual
discovery is helping them to expand their reach and influence particularly in Turkey
and the Middle East.

Their combined
effort and Moscow’s attempts to disrupt it thus deserve the closest scrutiny
and monitoring because as Gulyevich says what appears to be something relatively
marginal now may become vastly important in the not too distant future.